Christians besieged in Pakistan

The photos from Pakistan were anything but travel brochure material.

One showed a 9-year-old girl with dark eyes, large black burns on her legs and a heavily bandaged right arm.

Another showed a 14-year-old girl with a face partly melted away like candle wax. The right side was a mass of charred skin after an assailant threw acid into her eyes.

Their attackers said the girls’ injuries are payback for the American invasion of Iraq. Americans may not have seen much retaliation on their own soil because, several human rights groups say, Christians in Pakistan are taking the brunt of it.

The 9-year-old, Razia Masih, was beaten and raped on April 26 in the town of Faisalabad, near Lahore, ending up in the hospital with multiple burns, a lacerated left eye, a broken right arm and rope marks around her hands and mouth.

“She was working as a maid in a Muslim house,” said Shabazz Bhatti, chairman of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance.

“When the Iraq war happened, it was on the TV,” he said. “The family [that she worked for] would call her into the TV room and start torturing her. Her skin was burned by the irons, her body wounded by a cricket bat and a medical report showed 15 wounds on her body. She was told by them, ‘You are Christian and infidel, and we will take revenge on you for the killings of Iraqi children.’

“The case has been registered [with police], but the culprits have not been arrested. Meanwhile, the girl’s family has fled elsewhere, just to save their lives. The government authorities are not giving them protection.”

According to International Christian Concern (ICC), a religious-persecution watchdog group, the girl’s family had unsuccessfully tried to get her out of her employers’ home several times. After beating and burning her for a final time, the family sent her home to die.

The All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, representing Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Balmeek, Bheel, Maingwal, Zoarastrian, Bahai and Kelash communities, has compiled a “catalogue of terror” on attacks against female Christians, beginning with the May 3, 2000, gang rape of eight Christian girls by militant Muslims near Lahore.

A series of either gang rapes or acid-in-the-face attacks happened in July 2000, twice in 2001, twice in 2002 and three times so far in 2003.

On March 31, Natasha Emmanuel, 10, from a town near Rawalpindi, was raped by a Muslim neighbor linked with extremist Islamic organizations. The girl ended up in a hospital intensive-care unit for three days, the ICC says.

“Christians in Pakistan are increasingly vulnerable to religiously motivated hate crimes, and Christian girls and women seem to be specially targeted,” said Stuart Windsor, director of Christian Solidarity Worldwide in London. “We are outraged by the unwillingness of the police to investigate the complaints as this only emboldens extremists to continue to victimize Christians and other non-Muslims.”

Fearing such reprisals, the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom wrote Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on March 19, asking him to remind foreign governments of their responsibility to protect religious minorities.

Story Continues →